Anger, Anxiety and Agency

Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.

Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?

Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.

The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.

The end result for me has been that I am now a gatekeeper trying to prevent AI slop making its way into systems which I care about, and failing, and getting dragged into meetings with my boss about how my performance has gone down now that I'm chained to this stupid thing and forced to use it for even the most trivial tasks.

I haven't been this upset with PayPal mafia overlords since crypto.

From the perspective of the article, it seems that not having a target distinction between anxiety and anger would make the two feelings indistinguishable and thus the argument would fall apart. BUT, I do think there is a difference between the rage that comes from anger and the unease that comes from anxiety, and that may be triggered by the uncanny valley feelings from AI or the loss of job security from AI or the feelings of replacement that may come from AI or the environmental concerns that come from AI or the capitalistic underpinnings of the current implementation of AI, the list goes on. Some people may take anxiety from these things, and others may take anger. I don’t see one emotion as being less valid than the other.

Also, I don’t see any use in saying someone shouldn’t be angry or anxious in a particular situation. You can’t control your emotions like that. You can control how you _react_ to your emotions, but not the emotions themselves. I do think that emotional regulation is important in work (and also in life), but that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel what you feel.

People hate being unsure. Neurochemistry prefers anger to uncertainty. People get angry about being unsure. We feel anger in large part as our brain's natural salve for the discomfort of uncertainty. The suggestion he's making sort of defines away human nature.

(There's a lot of practical benefit to be gained from understanding this; for instance, skilled consultants put a price tag on certainty; you can sell determinism by itself, separate from any product or service you're more overtly offering.)